Winter, and Sigur Rós

Today, it is snowing balls out. Fluffy snow is gently landing all over the ground. Its that type of snowy day when silence is amplified; every sound is muffled by the White, passively engulfing everything. The best part is that I can't hear any of those fucking cars whirring back and forth like remote-controlled toys on Wilmette Avenue. A rare time to happily accept nature's presence, and the unending peace that accompanies it. No more sounds of humans scratching on my dirt, writhing. The snow takes care of that nonsense.

I had to shovel this beautiful fluff off of my sidewalk so my Mom won't slip, fall and yell at me. She always has places to go. Always using that fucking concrete sidewalk to get to her car to go places. She refuses to accept nature's presence, at least not willingly. I happily start shoveling when she's out of the house.

I go out in my pajamas and grab a shovel. I don't have to work hard to glide this soft snow off my property, but I decide to work at it to burn off some energy. Tripping on my untied boots, I feel the cold sting of snowflakes landing on my bare neck. Its hard to distinguish this sting on my neck, and the sting I'm getting from looking around and simply being overwhelmed. That unnerving sense of a loss of control, a loss of familiarity.

Now I have to shovel the snow off my steps. The steps were pretty icy already, so the snow was a bit more resistant to my plastic shovel. I had to chisel and scrape at the steps. Every scrape I made echoed everywhere, cutting through the snow and the white and the silence. Every scrape I made felt like I was ruining something. Disturbing something that was too sacred and beautiful to be fucked around with by some faggot with a piece of plastic.

I was done now. I had successfully finger-painted over this beautiful snow. A perfect little path for my mom to get from her car to the steps to the house. I even shoveled a path on the main sidewalk cuz fuck, why not? I looked ahead, looked up, and saw all the snow that was still falling. My path didn't do shit. In about ten minutes, I realized, its gonna be swallowed up by the rest of the white, just like everything else. Its like the snow is mocking me, laughing at my silly attempt to domesticate the white. "Fuck you and your little path," it'd say. "Go ahead and keep trying to control this. Get it all out of your system."

I felt more of the sting and walked back into the house, grinning. I obviously got in way over my head with this shoveling shit. Good thing I've got a house with a top-notch insulation system. Good thing I can hide from all this strange silence, this strange whiteness that creeps up and swallows everything. A man can't handle the cold white for too long. The silence would be so loud, you'd go crazy. The sights, the neural trauma of seeing everything so white, pretty soon everything would turn white and you'd go blind. A man gets goosebumps when in the presence of Winter, and its not just because he's cold. He's also nervous.

One of these days, i should get rid of this sidewalk. Just tear these slabs of concrete out of the grass and dirt. Just give up. Let Nature claim what it had all along. For now, though, I'll just let the White have its day. Soon, my Mom's gonna slip, fall and yell at me.

When I was writing this, I realized today would be a perfect day to blog about Sigur Rós.

Sigur Rós is a four-piece band from Iceland that captures the dreaminess and power of Winter better than any other band I know. Living in a place like Iceland, I assume they naturally picked up on the frequency, and became in-tune with their natural surroundings. These guys speak the language of Snow fluently.

Their music is never fast, but it is almost always powerful and staggering. Like winter, Sigur Rós doesn't have to stir up violent blizzards to be amazing. The guys of Sigur Rós also know how to make a forceful presence, like its beloved season. Oftentimes, their live act consists of 10 to 12 different musicians, (including the band leader Jónsi Þór Birgisson, who sings like a Eunuch and plays the guitar with a bow). They are an orchestra of majesty, and seeing them live is still something I need to do before I die.

Sigur Rós is the perfect music for winter. Last year, I listened to them nonstop between the months of January and April last year. Hopefully, you won't get as horribly addicted to these guys as I did, but they are one of the best things to listen to for this time of year. I'm posting my favorite albums of theirs for you to dig in on. Happy Kwanzaa

Ágætis Byrjun Really good album. Listen to the first 5 tracks of it.

( ) part 1 Probably my favorite Sigur Rós album. the last song is amazing.

( ) part 2

Takk... Great album... the first two songs are really good

P.S. You should also try to see Heima, a documentary about Sigur Rós and their hometown Reykjavic, Iceland. It has some of the best cinematography I have ever seen, and some terrific performances by the band. A really fascinating and beautiful film. Go see it on an HD tv or something. If you don't have the means though, here's the movie on Google Video:

Ravi Shankar - The Genius of

"The Genius of" indeed. Ravi Shankar is simply the master of sitar, and this album is a fine example of his brilliant work. This is mind-burning Indian-Classical at its finest; the songs are waterfalls of shimmering stringed instruments that envelop you with strange feelings. This sort of music tickles the parts of the brain that Western music never has been able to. Thus, bizarre things creep up when listening to this with an open mind. I don't think I have ever truly experienced Synesthesia, but Ravi Shankar's music has come closest to triggering the effects of this rare affliction; I can almost see colors when listening to this music.

Powerful effects for just some $5 record I borrowed from a friend.

I remember the first time I put on this splendid record. At first, none of it made sense. To my narrow perspective, the music seemed meandering and boring. I just didn't get it at the time.

Having a narrow mind has always been looked upon negatively in our society, but in actuality, the mind narrowing itself is perfectly normal. There's no biological point in human beings having a vast, versatile brain. We would all have such an open mind that we would probably have a difficult time perfecting certain skills needed to live. Also, an especially open mind is petty and unnecessary when it comes to survival. Although today we might wish we could learn five different languages with ease, our prehistoric ancestors had no need for such brainpower.

Children possess this brainpower, though, which is why they can master a language at age 5, effortlessly play an instrument and be incredibly creative individuals. This open mindedness was indeed needed for survival, because a child needed to be able to quickly adapt to his surroundings. Therefore, this skill has been luckily been preserved, and the children of modern millenia are still incredibly malleable beings. However, at around puberty, the child's brain weeds off the unneeded synapses and connections it has, thus, the brain loses its versatility, and learning and understanding become difficult.

This naturally-occurring narrow-mindedness applies to the understanding of music as well. Like the Indian language(s) itself, Indian music evolved completely separately from Western music. The two bear no similarities. Whereas Western music is strongly focused on tempo and structure, the music of Ravi Shankar has no tempo, and instead focuses on the complexities of sounds. The percussion used in this album is not so much to keep tempo, but to create diverse sounds and rhythms to accompany the rest of the instrumentalists. The sitar, of course, is a wild beast that can roar or gently purr through the beautiful tracks, and follows no structure.

This type of free, loose music can be unstimulating to an audience that is used to structured, systematic music. Being part of this audience, I had a hard time appreciating Ravi Shankar. It was only until I sat down with the record with an open mind, did I realize how brilliant and beautiful this music was. And because it was so foreign, it was peculiar to all other music I have heard.

This music is simply at a different frequency. To be able to enjoy it, one must be able to have an open enough mind, an way to somehow expand the ability to appreciate and understand, to be able to pick up on this frequency Ravi Shankar makes. Go ahead and learn the new language of sitar. You will not regret it.

UPDATE: I canNOT find a link to this album. Usually, I can find a link for any album, no problem, but I have been madly searching for a good half-hour, and I can't find this album!! I'd post a link myself, but I don't have this album on my computer at all, I just have the LP. dammit. If I find or get a link, I'll be sure to post it immediately, but for now, I guess this is all fucked. hrmph... Well, here's some pretty sweet videos of him you might enjoy, sorry everybody .

Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind

Another album that I haven't been able to stop playing. Its an EP of only 5 tracks, but they are all so blissfully insane and amazing, I just felt I would be remiss as a blogger if I didn't post it.

Some of the songs play the same bursts of sound over and over again, a technique most noise/ambient/whatever bands use profusely and ineffectively, but in Fall Be Kind, this repetition is never boring or dull. This is probably because the melodies are so weird and interesting, you never get sick of them. Throw in some sweet lyrics that are sung as weirdly as they are written, and you have some really hypnotic, meditative material.

I am tempted to call this material pensive, dreamy, but I hesitate, because there's definitely an edge to this stuff. The whole thing clouds together as a dreamy beautiful sound, but there's plenty of sharp edges and harsh rhythms that make up the songs. I guess Aldous Huxley said it best when he listened to one of Gesualdo's madrigals with a head full of mescaline:

"The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order... The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work."

I have never listened to Animal Collective's other stuff, but I'm gonna have to start now, because of this album. This is some beautiful music, straight up. Great driving music. Especially if you're driving into an ocean or something.

Favorite tracks: What Would I Want? Sky, On A Highway, I Think I Can

You Feelin Moldy, You're Not The Only

Hanatarash - 2

2 is not an easy album to withstand. I wouldn't be surprised if most people hated this album. In fact, I'd expect it. The rules that most sane-men follow when playing music (verses, choruses, the occasional solo/instrumental) are ignored in this album. So are all the standards of music we naturally have imposed on the concept and workings of music itself. Hanatarash tries to defy the very notion that this might even be music. And at first listen, I would say that they succeeded. But strangely, by the time I finished 2's second track, nonsensically-titled "we bite bollocks" (all lowercase), I realized that 2 is indeed music, because it provokes in a similar, yet different way, as "normal" music.

Music is able to instill us with all sorts of beautiful and twisted thoughts and emotions. it can relax us and make us feel energized and/or happy. It can make us contemplate about ourselves and life itself. Music is like a drug, as in it can manipulate and expand our minds to new creative highs or lows. Hanatarash does the same thing. The songs on this album give you the feeling of peaking on a handful of Amphetamines. I get an uneasy feeling, like I need to get up or something. My pulse literally quickens a little and I sense a little paranoia, if you could call it that. From second to second, the songs completely switch gears on you, going from piano-playing to crashing metal, or from the grind of a buzzsaw to jangling chimes and beeps. When you're listening, you're always on-edge, uncomfortably anticipating the next random switch-up, as if you're enduring Chinese water-torture and waiting for that next horrible drop of water.

The point is, Hanatarash has created Music, whether they wanted to or not. And that's what makes this album so amazing. It does to you what other forms of music can do, but because its under an artful facade of crashes, whirs, noises, beeps, screeches from the throat and the feedback, trashy strings and shattering glass, it doesn't appear so, and therefore, listening to it feels like an entirely new experience.

I couldn't blame you if you don't like it, though. It is weird to listen to music that bears absolutely no similarities to the boundaries that our minds have put on music. Over time, our brains have clearly defined what Music is, and what separates music from sounds and noises ("Sounds do not have structure, music does"). Hanatarash has now rendered this definition as an obsolete way to Listen. Everyday sounds and noises have always been known as unstructured and meaningless, but Hanatarash has done the impossible by provoking feelings and carefully orchestrating these noises. This band's work is a huge accomplishment for the evolution of Music, and humanity's perception of the medium, and what that medium exactly is. Unfortunately, it is so revolutionary, and so unfamiliar to us, that it is extremely alienating to most connoisseurs of music.

In short, 2 is utterly terrifying to the senses. It is chaos and insanity at light speed, and definitely NOT for the faint of heart.

Try starting out with we bite bollocks, my dad is car, pisshole surfers, and vortex shit.

ハナタラシ